BONUS - The 2022 Pandemic Olympics
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2022
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Beijing Winter Olympics kicks off this week in a much different pandemic context than the Tokyo Summer Olympics six months ago. Former Olympian and public health expert Dr. Tara Kirk Sell returns to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about what we know about how omicron and China's Zero COVID policy will likely make this Olympics much more complicated, the limitations of trying to maintain an Olympic bubble, and the dangerous potential for outbreaks given China's relatively low population immunity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.5 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. |
| 0:45.9 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Tara Kirksell of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health |
| 0:49.9 | Security and a former Olympian. |
| 0:52.3 | They discussed the Beijing Olympics, which kick off this week, |
| 0:55.1 | and how COVID-19 could cause a host of disruptions for these top athletes from around the world. |
| 1:01.1 | Let's listen. Tara Kirksell, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:07.0 | So I wanted to talk today about the Olympics, which, if you can believe it, is starting like this week. |
| 1:13.2 | And they're going to be in Beijing in the middle of the pandemic. |
| 1:17.4 | So talk to me about how this Olympics may be different from the one we just had six months ago in terms of COVID. |
| 1:27.2 | Well, six months ago, the Tokyo Olympics did not have to deal with the Omicron variant. |
| 1:33.5 | They were dealing with a less transmissible version of COVID-19. |
| 1:38.6 | And so while I really think that Tokyo had a very successful Olympics when it comes to thinking |
| 1:43.4 | about how they dealt with COVID, |
| 1:45.2 | I think it's going to be much more difficult for China to do this, especially in the context |
| 1:53.2 | of their push towards, you know, they kind of are wishy-washy about it, but it really is. |
| 2:00.0 | They're pushing for zero COVID, and that is going to be very difficult. They are going to see cases on arrival, and they're going to try to isolate those. The key's going to be, are they going to be able to prevent those cases from spreading anywhere else? And I think they'll have to see. So talk to me about this zero COVID policy they have. What does it mean? |
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